Making the Internet work Locally

Making the Internet work Locally

Can a "home town site" work? Can a group of people such as a local council, Chamber of Commerce, Board of Education work together? Yes and No. The major problem is aligning various parties to make a long term commitment to maintain, and update an integrated web site. Each organisation needs to commit themselves to updating their section of the site, or selecting a co-ordinator to gather information, integrate it into the site then post it.

Local content is significant for a small local site to work. The difficulty facing any business or organisation linked to a site is to penetrate the search engines for a very small or targeted geographic area. Perhaps they should modify their ambitions and develop content that attracts local people to a local web site and in turn local businesses or services. The Internet can be meaningfully better than the yellow pages while still drawing people into stores.

As an economy we need brick and mortar businesses and we need a web strategy that brings customers back and into the store. As one merchant said "I need to see them personally, as by providing the customer with individual service, I can often upgrade the purchase at the point of sale". Often the local media are of little help as they have their own on-line interest to promote and are owned by multinationals themselves. The vast majority of small town radio programming (or for that matter, a significant portion of major-market radio) is syndicated. Much of this material, in the near future will be "broadcast" via the Internet at no cost and at cheap bandwidth (faster data transfer to your computer at lower cost).

There is really no one place to find out about local organisations, recreation programs, or a good local directory of important phone numbers for government and schools. A web site can provide on-line calendars, a bulletin board, a guest book and local classified ads. If various community organisations were to send their relevant material to a community web site it could be published for all to see. If your local paper isn't on-line yet they are missing a golden opportunity to add valuable local content to the site and increasing the likelihood that more people will read it. (many of the visitors to a local "city" site are expatriates who want to keep in touch with their "home"). An e-mail newsletter could be sent out to local site visitors to alert readers to news they could read on the site before the local weekly paper is published.

Many small local businesses are not able to rationalise spending money on Internet advertising and will use the money for newspaper advertising, hand bills or mail outs but not be able to determine what the "payback" is for each mode of advertising. With proper Internet tools available at an Internet site response to various web pages and offers can be closely monitored.